March 16, 2016 by aliceangus · Comments Off on Artcodes and smart textiles at the Mixed Reality Lab

Since 2015 I’ve been working with the Mixed Reality Lab and Horizon Digital Economy Research at Nottingham University on their Artcodes/Aesthetocides . I have been part of the Artcodes research team and my work involves helping to research and develop the system through trialing and using it in public situations and testing out artcodes as part of public artworks, in social situatuions, working with groups and members of the public and experimenting with with textiles.

In my textiles reaearch I have been looking at how fabrics and drawings might ‘come alive’ in different ways with the stories that inspired them. My interest is in how the codes can be used materially with fabric, and socially, how they might work in different public situations, in the heritage sector and on costumes in theatre/performance.

The Artcodes app recognises visual codes (artcodes) within sophisticated patterns and illustrations. It allows you to create codes that can be made part of patterns and designs on everyday objects and in artworks. In contrast to image recognition the Artcodes system does not ‘recognise’ a specific image but it scans for a number of solid and blank spaces which can be in any configuration. This means that the shape can change but the code will still be recognised, the code can be shared between different images or patterns, or there can be multiple different drawings that contain the different codes.

I am looking at how codes and be used with different fabrics; as part of artworks, workshops and projects and in garments as part of performances with codes embedded into garments and costumes.

February 7, 2012 by stefankueppers · Comments Off on A few months in..

Wow, how time flies:

Starting my Proboscis experience began only in October and already it seems like a distant past as so many things are happening at the same time here:

The Proboscis team, Giles, Alice, Hazem and Mandy have been really warmly welcoming me into their fold and I have been getting to know all the many friends and collaborators in the various projects we are working on. It is a great experience getting into a totally different scale (much smaller!) and horizontal way of working; a big change from my previous Higher Education job! I have come needing to juggle wearing many hats: design, research, technology development, etc. and I am really relishing it. It is really great when you can mix up the strategic and the practical and a few things in-between.

All this took some time getting used to but what is great is that a lot of excitement in this involvement is already showing: There is the new thinking about the technology stack that we are evolving for our Public Goods Lab work, the authoring and (successfully!) bidding for new commissioned work (e.g. Exlab) with other exciting work in the pipeline. Then we have been rearranging our studio space to accommodate more fabrication space for our various projects. Now there is a corner for electronics prototyping with a kit bench that is slowly expanding for our circuit design and production.

We are slowly growing more capacity not just to fabricate electronics but in fact a wider range of components in house. At the moment we are adding ideas around 3d printing (rapid fabrication) and textiles to embedded electronics. We are also exploring motion capture technologies and the production of data landscapes using sound environments! This is very exciting also as we are re-interpreting ideas and processes previous Proboscis work to expand our exploration and play with notions around physical knowledge artefacts. We are looking to experiment in our various projects where we can take the ideas around them and what they could spark for different uses..

All the above is tied in with ongoing conversations with friends and colleagues I had made in my various previous places of work in an HE context (UCL & The Bartlett Faculty of the Environment & Central Saint Martins, The University of The Arts) where I was for example involved in projects around